education – Gamer Peak

TTRPGs with Kids – Rewarding Play

Young players can be the best players at your table. Whether you’re hosting a game for a group of students, one or more young family friends or your own kids, you’ll witness some great moments.

Young people have a way of seeing through problems in a way grown ups don’t. They are far more likely to think outside the box instead of trying to work out what ability is best to solve the problem or what rule they need to play on to win. They are not usually the best at the Role-Playing part – specifically doing what their character would do rather than what they would do – but they excel at coming up with awesome ideas for what their characters can do in the moment.

So what do we do to reward the awesomeness?

TTRPGs with Kids – Mischief Abound

Not matter what Table Top Role-Playing Game you are a part of, chaos is always just around the corner. One joke, one poor roll, one mischievous player can send the narrative off the rails. Depending on the group you’re with, the errant tangents and loss of thread might be what makes the experience all the more special. Eventually though, too much chaos can begin to chip away at the fun for the whole table.

When young people play Roleplaying Games like D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, etc all the behaviour you can expect at the table with adults can appear in extremes. Students of mine have often been the best sort of players I have run games for, but they can also be the most challenging.

We must be careful with the “your fun is wrong” sort of mentality, but we can all be at fault of poor gaming from time-to-time, and its especially true for young players with less experience.

My Students Ruined a Nursery Rhyme

When you spend your workday with 100+ students, you are going to hear some weird conversations. We all have strange moments – random thoughts said aloud, obscure inside jokes, etc. – but my school day is rife with half-overheard oddball moments.

Students in the playground asking which animal would make the best “were-animal” (my answer was werekomodo dragon), a hallway discussion on “the point of eyebrows” and at one point a student fiercely argued with me that the Titanic was a movie. Not a movie based on historic events, but a movie and nothing else because, and I quote, “if the boat sank then there is no way to prove that it happened”…

So at the end of one recent lesson, when a student asked me a random question, I thought it would just be another weird moment to add to the list. I soon realised that this would be terrible moment, and one that would prevent me from singing a particular rhyme ever again.

Haha, you don’t know _____!

I don’t take issue with a great deal while I’m teaching. I’m accepting of the broad span of opinions and preconceptions. I rarely feel the need to lecture people in or out of lessons, and I would never tell you your opinion is flat-out wrong. But when someone laughs at someone for not knowing something, that’s when I dust off the soapbox.

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Challenge in Gaming: What’s the best way to be tested?

I began playing Wolfenstein: New World Order a few weeks ago. I started the game in the usual way, by selecting ‘New Game’ and then perusing the available difficulties. I was curious to find a whopping five levels of difficulty available to me. It struck me at that moment that it’s been a very long time since I saw a game settle for an ‘Easy-Medium-Hard’ spread of difficulties. I also found it odd that New World Order was eager to throw so many options at me right out of the gate.

Personally, I could never begin a game on anything except ‘normal’. It makes much more sense to me to attempt a higher difficulty on the second play through, when I have the intricacies of the gameplay sussed. Games will often hide their highest settings, allowing them to be unlocked after the player has gone through the game once. I struggle to imagine anyone running headlong into Wolfenstein’s “ÜBER” setting on their first go and then enjoying the experience.

It’s not that I don’t think people would enjoy the most difficult setting. It’s the level of challenge present that I think would turn first-time players away. Playing a games ‘extreme’ difficulty is meant to be taxing, but if a player has mastered a game’s ‘normal’ setting, they can gauge for themselves whether they will be able to take on something greater. Whether or not a Gamer enjoys ‘challenging’ games, every game challenges us in some way and it’s up to us to decide how enjoyable that is.

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The Gunblade – Video Games vs. History

Whilst I would never consider myself a violent man, I find weapons fascinating. Whether they are a work of fiction or non-fiction, I see them as curious inventions that say a great deal about our species. Our History is full of strange and striking creations of war. It’s when Fantasy and Reality collide that things get really interesting

Weird Theory: Do Pokémon have a greater purpose?

There’s something slightly odd about the world of Pokémon. It’s not the hundreds of animals with elemental powers and supernatural abilities. No, that all makes perfect sense when you think about it. It’s the world itself that doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve poked fun at the nature of Pokémon in the past – the effortless and never-ending happiness of every NPC, the unspoken chivalric code between Pokémon, the disturbing side of Poké Balls – but I only recently put all the mysterious pieces together in one theory. A theory which explains all the oddities in the game series. A theory as airtight as it is entirely unnecessary.

Weird Theory: Do Pokémon have a greater purpose?

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School Trips to Game Worlds: A Space Station for All Subjects

Two weeks ago, I argued the case for an educational visit to Rapture. Last week, I set my sites on Neo-Paris. The third video game location I have in mind would probably make for the best school trip ever.

Practically every subject is potentially covered in this game location. Not only that, but this location is absolutely spectacular; if I could choose to visit any game location, for educational reasons or not, this would be my ideal destination. As with the two previous school trip proposals, this discussion implies that any excursion should be organised before the events of the game in question; it’s just safer that way.

School Trips to Game Worlds: Who fancies a Sci-Fi Croissant?

After finishing my first playthrough of Assassin’s Creed 2, I was left with a singular thought etched into my mindset. It was not the idea of being an assassin – what it would be like to run across roof troops and leap from inexplicable heights into bails of straw. No, I was left with a strong desire to visit Venice. Whilst playing through the latter stages of the game, I found myself wondering whether the city really is a gorgeous as the game suggests, and just how much Venice has changed since the 16^th Century.

Last week, I gave my proposal for a school trip to the fictional city of Rapture. The submerged scenery of the Bioshock games may be aesthetically pleasing, but the true worth of the city is in its educational possibilities. When the city was in its prime, Rapture would have opened the eyes and minds of any student able to visit. I also asked you to consider the following question:

If you could organise/embark on a school trip to a video game location, where would you go?

School Trips to Game Worlds: Where would you go?

Two weeks ago I was on a school trip in Berlin. Each time I go on this trip (this was the fifth time) a student looks up at the Reichstag building, turns to me and demands to know if that was the building ‘they’ assaulted at the end of Call of Duty: World at War. Every trip, without fail, and it always makes me chuckle.

Returning to my blog after a two week hiatus, I find myself mulling over an odd question (which formed somewhere between leaving the amazing city of Berlin and challenging my students to Mario Kart on the coach ride home) that I wish pose to anyone who has ever been a student or teacher:

If you could organise/embark on a school trip to a video game location, where would you go?